In Search of Joy

Maybe it has something to do with hotels. In the excellent book The Beechwood Airship Interviews, Nicky Wire of the Manic Street Preachers tells author Dan Richards how he likes to write in hotels because they are neutral spaces with none of the distractions of home life. Not even a kettle (Stop it with the kettles – Ed).

Wire’s theory certainly seemed to be proven when I made my way down to the lobby of the hip place in which I stayed recently. There in the gloom – gloom is so 2015 – was an ocean of floating white apples.

Death pallor faces. Grey light chiaroscuro. The ticking of nails on keys. Peck, pick, gaze downwards. The regular hiss of the espresso machine. In the café, the same scene was repeated. Silence. Gloom. Pick. Peck.

It wasn’t just there, it’s everywhere. Every social space has been taken over by screen zombies. The only faint flicker of a smile appears when they come across an image of a cute kitten. Where, I wondered, has happiness gone? Where is the joy?

What, even, is joy? The dictionary defines it as ‘a feeling of great pleasure and happiness’. In whisky terms, joy for me is the feeling of tasting the dram which signifies the end of work.

It might be in a bar or pub, it could be at home, it might be neat, with water, or in a highball. Joy is in the combination of liquid and moment and psychological state. Joy is being human. In this case, it is about gaining pleasure from whisky.

Here’s the question, though. These days, are you allowed to say that having a drink makes you happy? I suspect not. Happiness infers that the drink has altered your state. Saying whisky makes you happy contravenes a code, written or unwritten.

How much further?: in modern life, joy is a precious – and rare – commodity

A general – but also deliberately detached – sense of joy is possibly as close as you are allowed to go towards happiness before the lawyers come and get you. In this world, the liquid doesn’t provide the joy – some abstract notion about a brand does.

That’s not a criticism. I’m, er, joyful that there is someone out there trying to get round the restrictions and say, in a subtle way, that whisky can make you smile.

The question is, looking at the screen zombies, where is the joy? It’s not in front of you. It’s in the streets, it’s in company, it’s in the Apple-free irises of other people, it is in conversing and sharing.

The irony that you will be reading this on a screen is not lost on me, by the way. Walk away, switch off. Go outside, even if it is raining, and breathe.

Pour yourself a dram. Better still, pour whoever is next to you one as well. Whisky – taken in moderation – makes you happy. If we can’t say that in advertising, we have to find new ways of communicating that message. Maybe talking might help?